What is intelligent community growth?

Many of today’s fastest-growing companies understand the power of community. Through community-led growth (CLG) efforts, they drive awareness, customer acquisition, and customer retention by nurturing and supporting a community of users, champions, contributors, customers, and prospects.

Community-led growth, which accelerates the growth of the business alongside product-led growth and sales-led growth, is predicated on community growth, the cultivation, and success, of the community as a whole. The success of both of these is intertwined. Community-led growth requires an active and thriving community. But community leaders can sometimes struggle to get resources to build a community without first proving the impact of their efforts on the business—which community-led growth provides.

Adding intelligence through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies propels both initiatives forward by surfacing actionable insights from data:

• Integrating AI and ML into community-building efforts creates efficiencies and surfaces insights to enable community management at scale.
• Integrating these technologies into community-led growth turns engagement into actionable context that can impact business KPIs like retention, referrals, and acquisition.

In this blog, we’ll dive into intelligent community growth and its relationship to community-led growth. We’ll also take a look at the technology that powers these efforts, and discuss how you can best leverage an intelligent community-led growth platform.

Differentiating between community management, community growth, and community-led growth

Before we discuss the emergence of intelligent community growth and its benefits, let’s review the key concepts related to community growth and CLG.

• Community management: Day-to-day practices to engage and monitor a community, including facilitating member interaction, responding to user inquiries, sending welcome messages, and more.
• Community growth: All efforts aimed at building, nurturing, and strengthening a community. Communities come in all shapes and sizes. They may include users, champions, contributors, customers, and prospects, and can exist across a variety of platforms like Slack, Discord, Discourse, and more.
• Community-led growth: The process of using the power of community to impact business outcomes, such as increasing customer engagement, boosting retention, and amplifying user-generated content to promote a product or service.
• Intelligent growth: Using technology to strategically enhance community growth and community-led growth initiatives.
• Community-led growth platform: A platform that enables both intelligent community growth for building a stronger community for members as well as community-led growth to prove the impact of community on the business.

The emergence of intelligent community growth

To date, community growth efforts have been very manual. Many community managers spend hours reading through pages and pages of threads across different channels to keep a pulse on trending topics, sending individual welcome messages to new community members, and tracking engagement via detailed spreadsheets. As communities grow, these manual processes become increasingly laborious and unsustainable.

And there’s a limit to how much data you can capture from manual community management efforts alone. In the past, community growth happened in a silo. It was not possible to connect data about community engagement efforts to product or go-to-market data. The result? A limited understanding of why community matters and how it contributes to the success of your organization.

Intelligent community growth combines community data with AI and ML technologies to scale and maximize the opportunities presented by the community. This combination provides insights and context that can help automate manual processes to save time and create more efficiency, integrating data streams to help community managers and go-to-market leaders generate real insights to drive business success.

What are the benefits of intelligent community growth?

Intelligent community growth enables community managers and go-to-market leaders better understand their community and turn a community into a strategic business advantage. It’s a more proactive and strategic way to approach community management and generate real insights from the treasure trove of data collected within a community. These insights then power community-led growth.

The benefits of intelligent community growth include:

• A unified view of each of your community members across all your channels, including aggregated profile information and activity from all community tools (Slack, GitHub, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) as well as product usage and customer data
• Intelligently-identified insights and trends from across your community, including topics, activity, and sentiment
• The ability to take meaningful action on these insights, like automating a welcome message for new members or being proactively alerted to negative sentiment related to a specific product line
• Reporting that shows community growth as well as the impact of community on the business

From a resource perspective, intelligent community growth enables you to do more with less. With a layer of intelligence collecting, analyzing, and interpreting community happenings, companies can focus on innovation and action instead of reactionary management.

Elements of intelligent community growth

How does it work? Intelligent community growth leverages a combination of artificial intelligence, natural language processing technology, and automation tools that unlock the above benefits and enable community-led growth.

Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing

Intelligent community growth uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) to combine community engagement, product usage, and customer data into a single place and turn community engagement into actionable insights.

• Know who is in your community. Manually tracking engagement is an arduous task. Intelligent community growth uses AI to track engagements across platforms and threads, consolidate information into one comprehensive community member profile, and score members based on their engagement, sentiment, and value to your community and company.
• Measure sentiment. In addition to identifying and categorizing topics, NLP tools measure the sentiment of conversations to easily identify how community members feel toward a brand or a certain topic of conversation. With this technology, businesses can quickly get a pulse check on their community and prioritize engagement initiatives, pivot product messaging or development, and more to meet the needs of their community.
• Discover trending conversation topics. As communities grow, it can be difficult for community managers to keep track of conversations. This is especially true as communities form across different platforms—like Slack, Discord, and Discourse. Intelligent community growth uses AI to scan and organize conversation topics and let community managers and go-to-market leaders know what topics are most important to community members.
• Measure program impact. It can be difficult to connect community-led growth efforts to business KPIs. Intelligent community growth enables multidimensional data analysis by connecting business data and community data in one place.

Automation

In addition to using data to better understand members and surface what’s most important to them, intelligent community growth also uses automation to facilitate action on those insights. The ability to initiate automated action is a huge differentiator between traditional community management and intelligent community growth—automations create efficiencies and enable community management at scale.

• Communicate with members at scale. Automate actions to facilitate community management, like triggered welcome messages, check-in notes, or surveys that are sent to members upon completing a certain action or within a certain timeframe of when they join the community.
• Nurture superusers and fans. Automatically identify and attribute value to key people in your community. Understanding member impact allows community managers and go-to-market leaders to initiate actions to grow relationships with your most influential champions—like sending rewards, tagging relevant threads, or surfacing marketing and sales messages.
• Collaborate. Intelligent community growth enables greater collaboration within any organization, by categorizing activity and enabling actions for different teams—like consolidating feature feedback for the product team, surfacing negative sentiment for customer success, alerting the sales team to new organizations in the community, and more.

Common Room’s intelligent community-led growth platform

Intelligent community growth efforts are fueled by data and the ability to derive insights from this knowledge from across a community. A community-led growth platform uses AI and ML technologies to enable intelligent community growth and community-led growth.

For both of these efforts, organizations must connect data from disparate sources—including social media platforms, community forums, developer tools, sales and CRM tools, and more. Connected data sources are the best way to create unified community member profiles across sources, quantify the impact of community, and measure end-to-end community attribution.

Common Room’s platform includes over 20 native, out-of-the-box integrations to bring together all of your organization's data sources in one place. Common Room provides a holistic view of your community efforts and ties them to business outcomes.

In addition to the data integrations, Common Room’s community-led growth platform includes several pre-built intelligent actions to help community managers and go-to-market leaders immediately act on data insights. These include auto-categorization and conversation threading tools, powerful filters which enable you to create persona segments, and pre-built and customizable reporting templates that you can share and export to show the growth of your community and its impact on the business.

To intelligently engage and grow your community, try Common Room for free today. Looking for more? Connect with 1000+ community and DevRel leaders to share expertise and ask questions in the Uncommon community Slack.